Size ratios among sympatric neotropical cats

Kiltie, Richard A.

doi:10.1007/bf00379644

Cited by 78 publications

(120 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Results from Pantanal show a clumping pattern among all carnivorans. Our results concur with those of Kiltie (1984), who found that cats in the Neotropics do not show uniform size distributions. Size distributions in carnivorans appear to be dependent on both locality and species present.…”

Section: Masssupporting

confidence: 93%

“…Competition can also result in size segregation, and in extreme cases, this phenomenon could result in traits that are evenly dispersed from each other (Rosenzweig 1966). Evenly spaced mass distributions seem to be a communitydependent phenomenon and have been found in some studies (Ben-Moshe et al 2001;García and Virgó s 2007) but not others (Kiltie 1984).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Novel Multiscale Assessment of Community Assembly across Time, Space, and Functional Niche

Meachen

Roberts²

2014

The American Naturalist

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A basic ecological tenet is that organisms in a community occupy different niches and have different traits, but how consistently competition, selection, and phylogenetic effects structure communities remains uncertain. Are all communities created equal? We examine how mammalian carnivoran communities are assembled with regard to mass, diet, and locomotion. Here, we use a multivariate nearest-neighbor framework to examine multiple North American localities spanning 3 million years to determine whether community assembly is consistent through time and four modern localities around the world to assess the effects of habitat. Additionally, we examined how trait patterns differ among families and how familylevel evolutionary effects affect them. We found some broadly consistent patterns, although differences are more pronounced than similarities. Diet is more affected by evolutionary constraints than by time or place. Locomotion is most affected by habitat, and the ability to partition niches is related to habitat heterogeneity. Mass is influenced by family, but also by habitat and the mass-selective extinction events at the end-Pleistocene. These findings indicate that assembly patterns are not largely determined by within-community interactions but instead show that each community is a product of its independent variables.

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Section: Masssupporting

confidence: 93%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Novel Multiscale Assessment of Community Assembly across Time, Space, and Functional Niche

Meachen

Roberts²

2014

The American Naturalist

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“…This phenomenon has been documented in felids [19,60], most of which are solitary predators that kill their prey using a suffocating bite either to the neck or muzzle [67]. Owing to these behavioural specializations, felids are restricted to prey that can fit between the canine teeth [68,69], and larger felids have evolved a longer rostrum and larger jaw adductors to take larger prey [60]. Some carnivorous bats are known to rely on similar behaviours to kill their prey [23,24], thus skull shape allometry would represent a mechanism to further increase their range of prey sizes.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Go big or go fish: morphological specializations in carnivorous bats

2016

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Specialized carnivory is relatively uncommon across mammals, and bats constitute one of the few groups in which this diet has evolved multiple times. While size and morphological adaptations for carnivory have been identified in other taxa, it is unclear what phenotypic traits characterize the relatively recent evolution of carnivory in bats. To address this gap, we apply geometric morphometric and phylogenetic comparative analyses to elucidate which characters are associated with ecological divergence of carnivorous bats from insectivorous ancestors, and if there is morphological convergence among independent origins of carnivory within bats, and with other carnivorous mammals. We find that carnivorous bats are larger and converged to occupy a subset of the insectivorous morphospace, characterized by skull shapes that enhance bite force at relatively wide gapes. Piscivorous bats are morphologically distinct, with cranial shapes that enable high bite force at narrow gapes, which is necessary for processing fish prey. All animal-eating species exhibit positive allometry in rostrum elongation with respect to skull size, which could allow larger bats to take relatively larger prey. The skull shapes of carnivorous bats share similarities with generalized carnivorans, but tend to be more suited for increased bite force production at the expense of gape, when compared with specialized carnivorans.

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“…Switzerland, during a study of 201 with modal prey size (Kiltie 1984). Although these pairs of species may exploit similar-sized prey, they select different habitats.…”

Section: Natural Historymentioning

confidence: 99%